


Somnambulation Samba

by spyrograph



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, M/M, Nightmares, PTSD, Surreal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 17:38:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14676108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spyrograph/pseuds/spyrograph
Summary: After his escape from Interent Camp 371, Julian Bashir has trouble sleeping.





	Somnambulation Samba

Julian knew it was just going to take time to readjust to life on DS9. More than a month in that internment camp; he hadn’t despaired, but he had resigned himself to the fact that he might spend the rest of his life here with an unusual assortment of cellmates. He’d grown used to the terrible food, the close quarters, the stench of alien bodies and the ever-present threat of violence from their Jem’Hadar jailers. It was going to take time to get back into the rhythm of working and eating well and sleeping alone. 

It was sleeping alone that was causing him the most trouble. He’d been somnambulatory every night since his return. It was embarrassing, really. Sleepwalking was the sort of thing that happened to emotionally turbulent teenagers, not thirty year old doctors and certainly not to the Chief Medical Officer of a Starfleet outpost as important as Deep Space Nine! 

Julian’s first night back on Deep Space Nine; he’d woken to a flood of sounds- glasses clinking, people talking, the chirps various games and Leeta shouting “Dabo!” 

Disoriented, Julian sat down at the bar and tried to act as if he’d deliberately left his quarters half-dressed. 

Julian had experienced a bout of sleepwalking during his first year at Starfleet Academy. Nothing serious, he’d just stumbled around in the dark and annoyed his roommates by opening and closing doors, he’d not even left his dormitory. Julian never expected to sleepwalk in his adult life, and certainly never thought he’d end up doing so in a public space.

“Nice pajamas.” Quark smirked. 

“Uh, thank you.” Julian had been dreaming but could only remember he’d felt a keen sense of isolation, a longing to hear some particular sound… “A glass of warm milk with nutmeg, please.” He’d likely been having a nightmare about the week he’d spent in solitary confinement. He supposed his sleepwalk had brought him to Quark’s because it was bright and loud and alive and as close to diametrically opposite that cold and lonesome cell as any place could be.

At Academy he’d taken a history course that had covered the Geneva Convention and it’s various successors. Julian hadn’t truly understood then why solitary confinement was considered a form of torture. He had thought, naively, that solitude would be preferable to sharing squalid living conditions with half a dozen other prisoners.

That week in solitary had been eye-opening and mind-wrecking. At first, he’d thought he could just sleep the days away; but the silence kept him awake. He hadn’t realized until then how even the silent presence of another person was a conversation. How even the soft sounds of another person’s breathing, or foot tapping or teeth-sucking or head scratching, made a symphony of silent interpersonal spaces. When he did manage to doze off he was often jarred awake by the echoing sound of his own snores.

On the second night Julian put on some music, took a moderate dose of melatonin, and used Kukalaka as his pillow. 

He found himself gazing at his own reflection in the window of the promenade’s flower shoppe. He knew that he had been desperately searching for something but could not recall what. he could not shrug the sensation of guilt that, by waking from the dream, he had consigned someone to an unbearable darkness. He found Kukalaka smushed grotesquely by the door to his quarters.

The third night Julian placed a chair in front of his door and took a mild sedative. 

He was startled awake by Odo’s hand on his shoulder, “Are you alright, Doctor Bashir?”

“Yes, I’m- I’m fine,” he was groggy and mildly nauseous from the jolt of adrenaline. He did not know where he was. “I just got lost… in thought.” Julian remembered clearly that he’d been dreaming about a long, dark, and narrow tunnel. At the end of the tunnel there had been a voice and a soft light. He knew that no matter how quickly he reached that place it would already be too late.

“Do you often wander into restricted areas while lost in thought?”

“I’m sorry, Odo. It won’t happen again.”

Odo made a sound that conveyed disbelief and concern. If Odo mentioned it in his report neither Major Kira nor Commander Sisko brought it up the next day.

The morning of the fifth day since his return to Deep Space Nine, Julian woke in his own bed just as the computer brought the lights up for the day. Had he managed to stay in bed the entire night?

He remembered the dream this time. He had been moving down an endlessly long, dark and narrow tunnel. There was a soft light in the unreachable distance and the murmur of someone speaking under breath to himself. As Julian walked, the light became no closer and the murmur became agitated, became a shout, and an arhythmic bass banging of fists against hollow metal.

“I’m coming! Hold on!” he shouted but he could not hear himself. Absolute silence was the response. Silence that made his ears ring with an intensity that made him feel disembodied, weightless. He could not outrun the silence. The world rotated ninety degrees and suddenly the fading light at the end of the tunnel was above him and he could not reach it.

In the dream, Julian pounded on the wall, kicked it, shouted- but he could not hear anything. The silence was overwhelming. The darkness was disincorporating. He could not even feel the wall that he struggled to climb.

“Julian.” 

His name sounded foreign to him— a composite of syllables and vowels selected at random by centuries of linguistic drift— but the voice was familiar. 

“I’m right here.”

Then the world of the dream had shifted back to a less dizzying orientation and he had drifted upward— buoyed by that familiar voice— and the dream dissolved into a torrent of relief and nameless comforts and, finally, gentle oblivion. Then he’d woken.

Julian noticed the small creak of a chair, the whisper of cloth, the pad of footsteps. He sat up too quickly and felt light-headed.

“Good morning,” Garak said. 

“Garak? What are you doing in my room?”

“You and I need to have a conversation.”

“What sort of conversation couldn’t wait until I was out of bed?” 

“Really, Doctor Bashir!” the huff of his unvoiced laughter was as distinct as each consonant, “I’m the one who should be asking that question! Banging on my door in the middle of the night and shouting any number of blatant untruths about my emotional well-being! It’s behavior quite unbecoming of a Starfleet officer, I would say.”

“Oh, god.”

Garak’s smile was inscrutable, “My dear doctor. Some of the things you said were quite unforgivable.” The soft clink of fingernails on porcelain as Garak pressed a cup of tea into his hands. 

“What else did I say?”

“Oh, only that you thought you might die if you could not immediately have a conversation with me. It was rather charming, really. I’ve never had someone insist that my mere presence was ‘balm in Gilead’. I assume that is a literary reference.”

“It is.”

“So you do feel in waking the same way that you felt while you dreamt?”

Julian watched the steam move in delicate wisps across the surface of the tea and answered.

**Author's Note:**

> written in response to a prompt from stunnerstorm


End file.
